Norway 2016: Planning

Fitting trips abroad into bank holidays was a new idea for us last year and worked very well, granting us bonus trips to France, Sweden and the Czech Republic on top of our usual holidays. And so we were keen to do the same thing again, but this time with a twist; we decided to gift each other a surprise trip for Valentine's presents. Clare's holiday was the first bank holiday in May, and she chose to take us to Bergen, Norway.

We'll be flying out at 08:40 on the Saturday and returning at 19:10 on the Monday, so, as with last year's breaks, we'll have three whole days to fill. The Saturday will be spent in Bergen itself, Norway's second-largest city. Fortunately, a city only has to have 250,000 residents to attain that title, so we don't need to worry about being overwhelmed! We've identified a couple of things to do, including heading to Mount Floyen to get a nice view of the city, and taking a cable car.

We'll be up early on the Sunday morning, taking a bus to Flåm, a lovely, tiny village inside some fjords. We'll spend a bit of time there before taking a cruise on the Nærøyfjord and heading to Gudvangen, another village. That's a day which will be full of beautiful scenery!

On the Monday we'll be retracing some of the previous day's steps, in that we'll be off to Flåm again. This time we'll be journeying from there to Myrdal, a tiny place with next to nothing in it. The reason for the going there isn't to get to Myrdal in itself, but because the journey from Flåm to Myrdal is one of the most scenic in the world.